Hundreds of Port Moresby residents on a predawn walk to promote safety on the streets.Credit:Eddie Jim

Saina* was hit so often she says her body started getting used to the pain.

Her husband grew up in a family where violence was normal. He had mood swings, triggered by a potent mix of alcohol and jealousy.

Saina has a prestigious job at a firm in Port Moresby. Under Papua New Guinea’s wantok system of kinship, those with money have a cultural obligation to share their wealth with their clan.

So Saina would help pay bride prices (a traditional payment made by the groom’s family when a couple marries) or death compensation or for a feast to celebrate a young woman’s first menstruation.

Saina says her husband felt inferior and angry when she was publicly thanked. “You are doing these things to get a big name,” he would tell her.

She begged her relatives to acknowledge her husband, the “head of the family”, and not her: “They praise the breadwinner and it demoralises the male ego.”

And so the beatings would start again.

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Every three months or so Saina would seek refuge at relatives’ homes until things cooled down.

Once, when pregnant, she went to a safe house: “They said they didn’t have dietary supplements to cater for pregnant women.”

So Saina waited, yet again, at an auntie’s house, until her husband came to collect her and her newborn, bringing a pig for the relatives to atone for his violence.

“In PNG a pig pays for everything,” Saina says. “Instantly they forget your pain and struggle and send you back to your husband."

Papua New Guinea is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a woman. There is a lack of official data but an estimated two in three women are affected by domestic violence.

Belief in sorcery, known locally as sanguma, is widespread. Violence against those believed to be sorcerers or witches - most of whom are women - has escalated, especially in the country's Highlands.

Ninety per cent of women in prisons in Papua New Guinea are serving time for murder, after acting in self-defence in response to family violence, according to a PNG government report.

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In October last year, two things changed in Saina’s life.

Saina’s husband began hitting their three-year-old son. She believes this was a way of him hurting her when she was numb to her own pain. Saina knew this time she had to leave him, for the sake of her four children.

Meanwhile, Saina’s company subscribed to Bel isi PNG (Peaceful PNG), a world-first public-private partnership which marshals business to help tackle the country's epidemic of family and sexual violence.

Saina and her children spent a few days in a safe house. Bel isi PNG connected her to counselling and welfare services and helped her obtain a restraining order against her husband.

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It’s been a long and at times frightening ordeal.

She’s moved home several times and changed bus routes. She paid her relatives to sit outside her child’s school gates all day and tip off the teachers and police if her husband arrives: “Violence is expensive in PNG.”

But now, a year on, “absolutely I feel safe”.

“Not only safe, I feel I have mental peace, I am emotionally stable, I concentrate on my work. My kids are still traumatised at times when triggered by fights or shouts but overall they are happier and their school grades have dramatically improved.”

In 2017 the PNG government released a national strategy to prevent and respond to gender-based violence.

It said that despite work by the PNG government, civil society and the international community to address the problem since the early 1980s, “violence remains serious and pervasive”.

The “rights-based and gender-responsive approaches” to tackle violence had struggled to be accepted in conservative PNG society.

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The vast majority of these focused on awareness-raising, which the strategy said was only a first step that alone was not effective in reducing violence.

“The modern state, combined with some enduring aspects of traditional cultures and Christianity, has perpetuated patriarchal beliefs, ideas, attitudes, behaviours and institutions,” the strategy said.

“Human rights and gender equality, for instance, are still rejected and misperceived as Western ideas. In some circles they are seen as radical, subversive and in conflict with traditional cultures, Melanesian ways and Christian religious doctrine.”

But Bel isi PNG looks at violence from another perspective. It recognises that as well as being a humanitarian issue, violence is also a significant cost to business.

A recent survey of three large companies in Port Moresby found 68 per cent of employees had experienced family and sexual violence. They lost an average 11 days of work a year as a result.

The amount of staff time lost cost one of the companies 3 million kina ($A1.28 million), which was nine per cent of its total salary bill.

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Stephanie Copus-Campbell, who has worked on development programs in PNG for years, believes Bel isi PNG is a potential gamechanger.

“Bel isi PNG has chosen to tackle the problem from the angle of the economic impact on the workplace, which benefits both individuals and companies,” she says.

Copus-Campbell formerly headed the Australian aid program to PNG and is now the executive director of the Oil Search Foundation, which runs health, education and women's protection programs.

Several years ago one of her top-performing employees suddenly stopped coming to work. A month went by. Copus-Campbell begged the woman to talk to her: “I really cared about this woman but I also risked losing her.”

Finally the employee agreed to meet at a local hotel. “She was sitting in a dark corner,” Copus-Campbell recalls. “All she did was pull her hair back.”

The woman had been horribly disfigured by her husband.

The experience haunted Copus-Campbell. It persuaded her not only of the need to support domestic violence survivors in the workplace but also to spend a lot more time “listening and not telling”.

Bel isi PNG started with a donation from Bank South Pacific - a building.

The bank’s head of support services, Alicia Sahib, suggested its disused single men’s quarters could be converted into a safe house after learning bank employees were accessing other shelters. “That was a shock to me,” Sahib says.

'That was a shock to me': Alicia Sahib of Bank South Pacific.Credit:Eddie Jim

Steamships Trading Co provided office space for the case management centre, which is operated by Femili PNG, a non-governmental organisation that tackles family and sexual violence. The Oil Search Foundation agreed to design, manage and help fund the project.

Most of these have also implemented policies that address family and sexual violence in the workplace.

Copus-Campbell acknowledges only about 15 per cent of Papua New Guineans are employed in the formal sector. Meanwhile, 85 per cent live in rural areas, where violence is prevalent.

In July, women and children were hacked to death with machetes during the slaughter of more than 20 people in the mountains of Hela province, sparking fears of a new era of tribal violence.

Copus-Campbell says survivors of violence who need help in any province can call Bel isi PNG and be connected to local services. “It’s a heck of a lot better than 20 years ago but we still have a long way to go.”

One of the things Papua New Guineans have stressed to Bel isi PNG is the need for men to be involved in advocating for change.

The government’s strategy on violence notes “currently very few organisations in the youth or men’s sector are active in gender-based violence response”.

In 2013 Kepari Leniata was burned alive in Mount Hagen, in the Western Highlands province of Papua New Guinea, after she was accused of bringing about the death of a six-year-old boy using witchcraft. Her gruesome murder prompted an outpouring of grief and anger and led to a government crackdown on sorcery-related violence.

It was also the catalyst for Eddie Aila to found Warrior Culture, a program which runs workshops in villages, communities and companies to help men overcome violent behaviour.

“When Kepari Leniata was murdered some leaders were asking for men to be tortured, killed, castrated,” Aila says.

“I felt this language was going to scare men away. I was telling people they have to get men involved to stop family and sexual violence, they are 50 per cent of the family.”

Eddie Aila: 'I felt no one was listening'.Credit:Eddie Jim

But Aila said while there were many programs for women, no one was helping men.

“I started Warrior Culture because I felt no one was listening to me when I said men don’t know how to manage their emotions, men don’t talk about it, the expectation is they are macho.”

Aila is a sporting legend in PNG who represented his country in rugby league in the 2000 World Cup.

He has also faced his own demons. His partner left their violent relationship when he was 30. “When she left I thought she would come back because that is part of the cycle of violence,” Aila says.

“When she didn’t come back the massive void forced me to look inside. I thought: ‘This is terrible, my boys are going to be like me, and my girls are going to marry someone like me’. It forced me to change.”

Warrior Culture is inspired by the hausman (men’s house) tradition in Papua New Guinea, where values and norms are taught by elders.

Aila is honest about his own experience. He says men, who are initially nervous around such a heavy topic, open up. They discuss blaming their wives for making them mad, suicide and concerns about infidelity.

“Men are basically feeling scared,” Aila says. “The pattern is always the same … they don’t think they are good enough.”

Aila is among a group of men whom Bel isi PNG has enlisted to help champion change. Another is Powes Parkop, the voluble governor of Port Moresby.

Every Sunday, in the predawn streets of Port Moresby, Parkop leads a spirited eight-kilometre community walk, the pace more a gallop than a Sunday stroll.

The walk is about promoting health but also a symbolic reclaiming of the streets for women and girls. Many carry banners calling for a safe city.

At walk’s end, on a makeshift stage on the side of the road, Parkop delivers a rousing sermon to the assembled crowd: stop violence against women, stop spitting betel nut, stop littering.

“The future will not clean itself,” he booms. “The problem of violence in our city and our country is not a women’s problem. It is our problem because men are insecure.”

But not all male champions of change are high-profile.

Ovia Hekau lives with his wife and three daughters in a traditional stilt house in the village of Hanuabada on Port Moresby’s coastline.

The family fish through a hole in the lino on the kitchen floor. “Christ is the head of this house,” says a sign in the living room.

Hekau works as a driver for the Oil Search Foundation and when he heard the male champions of change program discussed in the car, Hekau said he was keen to be involved.

“I would see my dad bashing up my mum,” he says. “The arguments were loud, it was really frightening. I was five, maybe six years old … just sitting and crying.”

Hekau vowed not to repeat the past when he had his own family: “It wouldn’t put a good picture for my children.”

Community members often seek Hekau’s counsel. He advises them not to hit their partners if they hear they have been unfaithful.

“After belting your wife [if] you find out what you heard is not true, you will definitely regret it,” he tells them.

Hekau’s wife, Vavine, says her husband’s friends and cousins look up to him. “He doesn’t take sides against the wife, for him wife-bashing is wrong,” she says softly. “I am so proud he is not like his dad.”

*Saina's name has been changed to protect her identity

Jewel Topsfield and Eddie Jim travelled to Papua New Guinea courtesy of the Oil Search Foundation.